Mikhail Gorbachev ribbed acting Governor Codey today about his dual role as New Jersey's chief executive and Senate president. The man who led the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991 said "all that power in one set of hands."

Gorbachev is in Trenton to mark the 20th anniversary of a sister-city relationship between New Jersey's capital and Moscow.

2 Comments:

Gorbachev was probably thinking about an old Russian joke dealing with a worker and his employer, a manufacturing plant run by the Communist government. A commisar who was temprarily assigned to the plant began to notice that this certain worker left the plant each day carrying a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Becoming suspicious, he had the guards sift through the dirt and found nothing. This went on for weeks on end, driving the commisar crazy, because each time the guards looked, they found only dirt. When the commisar received his new appointment to another manufacturing facility he went to the worker and said, "Look, I'm being transferred to another plant so I'm not going to prosecute you but I want you to tell me what were you stealing. The worker simply replied, "wheelbarrows."